Texts

y separately published work icon Mrs Petrov's Shoe Noëlle Janaczewska , 2006 Brisbane : Playlab , 2013 Z1262526 2006 single work drama (taught in 4 units) 'In the afternoon of 19 April, 1954 Evdokia Petrov, wife of a recently defected Soviet spy, was dragged, weeping and with one foot bare, across the tarmac at Sydney's Mascot Airport to be sent back to the USSR. Forty years later, in 1994, Helen Demidenko released The Hand That Signed the Paper about her experience growing up a Ukrainian Australian, to widespread critical acclaim - before being unmasked as not quite the person she claimed to be. The play revisits both of these startling events and explores Cold War Australia fears of Russian spies and 'Reds under every Bed'. Source: http://www.theprogram.net.au/giveawaysSub.asp?id=682&state_id= (Sighted 21/04/06).
y separately published work icon The Dreamers Jack Davis , Paddington : Currency Press , 1996 Z450251 1982 single work drama (taught in 18 units)
— Appears in: ドリーマーズ : ノー・シュガー 2006;

'With humane irony the Western Australian poet, Jack Davis gives a painful insight into the process of colonisation and the transformation of his people.'

'The Dreamers is the story of a country-town family and old Uncle Worru, who in his dying days, recedes from urban hopelessness to the life and language of the Nyoongah spirit which in him has survived 'civilisation'.' (Currency Press website)
y separately published work icon Don's Party David Williamson , 1971 1971 (Manuscript version)x402002 Z1505961 1971 single work drama satire (taught in 17 units)
y separately published work icon The Ghosts Trilogy Janis Balodis , Paddington : Currency Press , 1997 Z495464 1997 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon Collected Plays : Volume I Patrick White , Sydney : Currency Press , 1985 Z60895 1985 selected work drama (taught in 19 units)
y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.
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